Doctor Zhivago (9 page)

The people packed into the nook dispersed. Pasha, who had been afraid to call out, rushed to the old woman.

They walked home. Marfa Gavrilovna grumbled all the while. “Cursed
murderers, fiendish butchers! People are rejoicing, the tsar has given them freedom, and they can’t stand it. They’ve got to muck it all up, turn every word inside out.”

She was angry with the dragoons, with the whole world around her, and at that moment even with her own son. In this moment of passion it seemed to her that everything going on now was all the tricks of Kuprinka’s blunderers, whom she nicknamed duds and smart alecks.

“Wicked vipers! What do the loudmouths want? They’ve got no brains! Nothing but barking and squabbling. And that speechifier, how about him, Pashenka? Show me, dear, show me. Oh, I’ll die, I’ll die! It’s perfect, it’s him to a tee! Yackety-yack-yack-yack. Ah, you buzzing little gadfly!”

At home she fell upon her son with reproaches, that it was not for her, at her age, to be taught with a whip on the behind by a shaggy, pockmarked blockhead on a horse.

“For God’s sake, mama, what’s got into you? As if I really was some Cossack officer or sheik of police!”

Nikolai Nikolaevich was standing at the window when the fleeing people appeared. He understood that they were from the demonstration, and for some time he looked into the distance to see if Yura or anyone else was among the scattering people. However, no acquaintances appeared, only once he fancied he saw that one (Nikolai Nikolaevich forgot his name), Dudorov’s son, pass by quickly—a desperate boy, who just recently had had a bullet extracted from his left shoulder and who was again hanging about where he had no business to be.

Nikolai Nikolaevich had arrived in the fall from Petersburg. He had no lodgings of his own in Moscow, and he did not want to go to a hotel. He stayed with the Sventitskys, his distant relations. They put him in the corner study upstairs on the mezzanine.

This two-storied wing, too big for the childless Sventitsky couple, had been rented from the Princes Dolgoruky by Sventitsky’s late parents from time immemorial. The Dolgoruky domain, with three courtyards, a garden, and a multitude of variously styled buildings scattered over it in disorder, gave onto three lanes and bore the old name of Flour Town.

Despite its four windows, the study was rather dark. It was cluttered with books, papers, rugs, and etchings. On the outside, the study had a balcony that ran in a semicircle around that corner of the building. The double glass door to the balcony had been sealed off for the winter.

Through two of the study windows and the glass of the balcony door, the whole length of the lane was visible—a sleigh road running into the distance, little houses in a crooked line, crooked fences.

Violet shadows reached from the garden into the study. Trees peered into the room, looking as if they wanted to strew the floor with their branches covered with heavy hoarfrost, which resembled lilac streams of congealed stearine.

Nikolai Nikolaevich was looking into the lane and remembering the last Petersburg winter, Gapon, Gorky, the visit of Witte, the fashionable contemporary writers.
⁷
From that turmoil he had fled here, to the peace and quiet of the former capital, to write the book he had in mind. Forget it! He had gone from the frying pan into the fire. Lectures and talks every day—he had no time to catch his breath. At the Women’s Institute, at the Religious-Philosophical Society, for the benefit of the Red Cross, for the Fund of the Strike Committee. Oh, to go to Switzerland, to the depths of some wooded canton. Peace and serenity over a lake, the sky and the mountains, and the vibrant, ever-echoing, alert air.

Nikolai Nikolaevich turned away from the window. He had an urge to go and visit someone or simply to go outside with no purpose. But then he remembered that the Tolstoyan Vyvolochnov was supposed to come to him on business and he could not leave. He started pacing the room. His thoughts turned to his nephew.

When Nikolai Nikolaevich moved to Petersburg from the backwoods of the Volga region, he brought Yura to Moscow, to the family circles of the Vedenyapins, the Ostromyslenskys, the Selyavins, the Mikhaelises, the Sventitskys, and the Gromekos. At the beginning, Yura was settled with the scatterbrained old babbler Ostromyslensky, whom his relations simply called Fedka. Fedka privately cohabited with his ward, Motya, and therefore considered himself a shaker of the foundations, the champion of an idea. He did not justify the trust put in him and even turned out to be light-fingered, spending for his own benefit the money allotted for Yura’s upkeep. Yura was transferred to the professorial family of the Gromekos, where he remained to this day.

At the Gromekos’ Yura was surrounded by an enviably propitious atmosphere.

“They have a sort of triumvirate there,” thought Nikolai Nikolaevich, “Yura, his friend and schoolmate Gordon, and the daughter of the family, Tonya Gromeko. This triple alliance has read itself up on
The Meaning of Love
and
The Kreutzer Sonata
, and is mad about the preaching of chastity.”
⁸

Adolescence has to pass through all the frenzies of purity. But they are overdoing it, they have gone beyond all reason.

They are terribly extravagant and childish. The realm of the sensual that troubles them so much, they for some reason call “vulgarity,” and they use this expression both aptly and inaptly. A very unfortunate choice of words! The “vulgar”—for them it is the voice of instinct, and pornographic literature, and the exploitation of women, and all but the entire world of the physical. They blush and blanch when they pronounce the word!

If I had been in Moscow, thought Nikolai Nikolaevich, I would not have let it go so far. Modesty is necessary, and within certain limits …

“Ah, Nil Feoktistovich! Come in, please,” he exclaimed and went to meet his visitor.

Into the room came a fat man in a gray shirt girded with a wide belt. He was wearing felt boots, and his trousers were baggy at the knees. He made the impression of a kindly fellow who lived in the clouds. On his nose a small pince-nez on a wide black ribbon bobbed angrily.

Divesting himself in the front hall, he had not finished the job. He had not taken off his scarf, the end of which dragged on the floor, and his round felt hat was still in his hands. These things hampered his movements and prevented Vyvolochnov not only from shaking Nikolai Nikolaevich’s hand, but even from greeting him verbally.

“Umm,” he grunted perplexedly, looking into all the corners.

“Put it wherever you like,” said Nikolai Nikolaevich, restoring to Vyvolochnov his gift of speech and his composure.

He was one of those followers of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy in whose heads the thoughts of the genius who had never known peace settled down to enjoy a long and cloudless repose and turned irremediably petty.

Vyvolochnov had come to ask Nikolai Nikolaevich to appear at a benefit for political exiles at some school.

“I’ve already lectured there.”

“At a benefit for political exiles?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to do it again.”

Nikolai Nikolaevich resisted at first but then agreed.

The object of the visit was exhausted. Nikolai Nikolaevich was not keeping Nil Feoktistovich. He could get up and leave. But it seemed improper to
Vyvolochnov to leave so soon. It was necessary to say something lively and unforced in farewell. A strained and unpleasant conversation began.

“So you’ve become a decadent? Gone in for mysticism?”

“Why so?”

“A lost man. Remember the zemstvo?”

“Of course I do. We worked on the elections together.”

“We fought for village schools and teachers’ education. Remember?”

“Of course. Those were hot battles.”

“Afterwards I believe you went into public health and social welfare? Right?”

“For a while.”

“Mm—yes. And now it’s these fauns, nenuphars, ephebes, and ‘let’s be like the sun.’
⁹
For the life of me, I can’t believe it. That an intelligent man with a sense of humor and such knowledge of the people … Drop it all, please … Or maybe I’m intruding … Something cherished?”

“Why throw words around at random without thinking? What are we quarreling about? You don’t know my thoughts.”

“Russia needs schools and hospitals, not fauns and nenuphars.”

“No one disputes that.”

“The muzhiks go naked and swollen with hunger …”

The conversation progressed by such leaps. Aware beforehand of the futility of these attempts, Nikolai Nikolaevich began to explain what brought him close to certain writers of the symbolist school, and then went on to Tolstoy.

“I’m with you up to a point. But Lev Nikolaevich says that the more a man gives himself to beauty, the more he distances himself from the good.”

“And you think it’s the other way round? Beauty will save the world, mysteries and all that, Rozanov and Dostoevsky?”
¹⁰

“Wait, I’ll tell you what I think myself. I think that if the beast dormant in man could be stopped by the threat of, whatever, the lockup or requital beyond the grave, the highest emblem of mankind would be a lion tamer with his whip, and not the preacher who sacrifices himself. But the point is precisely this, that for centuries man has been raised above the animals and borne aloft not by the rod, but by music: the irresistibility of the unarmed truth, the attraction of its example. It has been considered up to now that the most important thing in the Gospels is the moral pronouncements and rules, but for me the main thing is that Christ speaks in parables from daily life, clarifying the truth with the light of everyday things. At the basis of this lies the thought that communion among mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic because it is meaningful.”

“I understand nothing. You should write a book about it.”

When Vyvolochnov left, Nikolai Nikolaevich was overcome by a terrible irritation. He was angry with himself for blurting out some of his innermost thoughts to that blockhead Vyvolochnov without making the slightest impression on him. As sometimes happens, Nikolai Nikolaevich’s vexation suddenly changed direction. He forgot all about Vyvolochnov, as if he had never existed. He recalled something else. He did not keep a diary, but once or twice a year he wrote down in his thick notebook the thoughts that struck him most. He took out the notebook and began jotting in a large, legible hand. Here is what he wrote:

“Beside myself all day because of this foolish Schlesinger woman. She comes in the morning, sits till dinnertime, and for a whole two hours tortures me reading that galimatias. A poetic text by the symbolist A for the cosmogonic symphony of the composer B, with the spirits of the planets, the voices of the four elements, etc., etc. I suffered it for a while, then couldn’t take it anymore and begged her, please, to spare me.

“I suddenly understood it all. I understood why it is always so killingly unbearable and false, even in
Faust.
It is an affected, sham interest. Modern man has no such quests. When he is overcome by the riddles of the universe, he delves into physics, not into Hesiod’s hexameters.
¹¹

“But the point is not only the outdatedness of these forms, their anachronism. The point is not that these spirits of fire and water again darkly entangle what science had brightly disentangled. The point is that this genre contradicts the whole spirit of today’s art, its essence, its motive forces.

“These cosmogonies were natural to the old earth, so sparsely populated by man that he did not yet obscure nature. Mammoths still wandered over it, and the memories of dinosaurs and dragons were fresh. Nature leaped so manifestly into man’s eye and so rapaciously and tangibly onto his neck, that everything indeed might still have been filled with gods. Those were the very first pages of the chronicles of mankind, they were only the beginning.

“In Rome that ancient world ended from overpopulation.

“Rome was a marketplace of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a two-tiered throng, on earth and in heaven, a swinishness that bound itself up in a triple knot, like twisted bowels. Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy, spokeless wheels, eyes wallowing in fat, bestiality, double chins, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves, illiterate emperors. There were more people in the world than ever again, and they were squeezed into the passageways of the Coliseum and suffered.

“And then into the glut of this gold and marble tastelessness came this one, light and clothed in radiance, emphatically human, deliberately provincial,
a Galilean, and from that moment peoples and gods ceased, and man began, man the carpenter, man the tiller, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset, man without a drop of proud sound, man gratefully dispersed through all mothers’ lullabies and through all the picture galleries of the world.”

The Petrovsky Lines made the impression of a corner of Petersburg in Moscow. The matching buildings on either side of the street, the entrances with tasteful stucco moldings, a bookshop, a reading room, a cartography establishment, a very decent tobacco store, a very decent restaurant, in front of the restaurant gaslights in frosted globes on massive brackets.

In winter the place frowned with gloomy haughtiness. Here lived serious, self-respecting, and well-paid people of the liberal professions.

Here Viktor Ippolitovich Komarovsky rented his luxurious bachelor quarters on the second floor, up a wide staircase with wide oak banisters. Solicitously entering into everything, and at the same time not interfering with anything, Emma Ernestovna, his housekeeper—no, the matron of his quiet seclusion—managed his household inaudibly and invisibly, and he repaid her with chivalrous gratitude, natural in such a gentleman, and did not suffer the presence in his apartment of guests and lady visitors incompatible with her untroubled, old-maidenly world. With them reigned the peace of a monastic cloister—drawn blinds, not a speck, not a spot, as in an operating room.

On Sundays before dinner Viktor Ippolitovich was in the habit of strolling with his bulldog on Petrovka and Kuznetsky Most, and at one of the corners, Konstantin Illarionovich Satanidi, an actor and gambler, would come to join them.